Earlier this summer, the four of us spent three days in a room with a dozen others whose jobs sound nothing like ours, or like each other’s: a cosmologist, an emergency management scholar, a genetic counselor, a hydrologist, a neuropsychologist, a health risk communication scholar, a cognitive neuroscientist, a theater director, an investigative journalist and a meteorologist. We’re also from four different disciplines: a sociologist, a human rights scholar, an Indigenous community health scholar and a microbial geneticist.
We had convened through CIFAR, a research organization that gathers interdisciplinary groups to work on hard questions, for a workshop on a challenge that none of our fields can solve alone: how to grapple with, and communicate about, uncertainty in research.
